Category: Develop

Butterfly SmartCity Network

Butterfly SmartCity Network by PayServices.com has now reached 80 cities and over 100,000 users. The Internet of Things is unstoppable, especially in cities where the data is useful and convenient. Plus, the simplicity of having all the localized and emergency services in one App for each city, is smart.

STATE OF THE ART SECURITY

Built from the ground up with top notch financial banking level system security, user friendly multi-factor identification and advanced procedures in AML (Anti Money Laundering), KYC (Know Your Customer/Citizens), and GRC (Governance Risk Compliance).

Butterfly SmartCity Network BUSINESS MODEL

For a city to join the Butterfly SmartCity Network and receive its own Butterfly SmartCity Co-Branded App the process is free and similar to opening a social media page for the city and the economics for PayServices behind the business model are similar to merchant services and free online services such as the ones search engines have adopted.

Cities, counties, and states that join the network are required to sign a non-exclusive collaboration agreement making it an official member of the network.

Upon the execution of the collaboration agreement to join the network, city officials are given a “Go To Market” kit containing basic information, as well a person of contact within the Butterfly Effect Team available for assistance.

The integration of city data such as GIS layers, and the interfacing with existing legacy systems (some of which may require a little bit of development from PayServices) are mostly free of charge for the city and usually handled within a matter of days. We do our best to adapt to the needs of your city.

Having one app that offers so many services altogether as part of an ecosystem where all is interconnected allows your city to advertise only one single app instead of ten different services. This method permits the increase in market adoption among residents and simplicity at all levels by having only a single platform to support instead of several that were never meant to be compatible.

For more information Please visit Butterfly SmartCity Network

SmartCity Network Photo credit: KCOWAN0186 on Visual hunt / CC BY-NC-ND

June 25, 2019
Moore’s Law and Murphy’s Law

One good law deserves another, or why fly on one wing? Seriously, I intended to add some information about Moore’s Law here because it comes up in conversation often and did again today, so I took that as a cue to look it up and extract a blog post from the findings and yes there’s allot to be found when you go poking around Moore’s Law.

Murphy’s law is an adage or epigram that is typically stated as: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. Just so that’s clear.

Moore’s Law is not and adage of epigram, it is a theoretic, scientific assumption.

Gordon Moore photo by Steve Jurvetson from Menlo Park, USA – Moore Fish, CC BY 2.0, Link

Moore’s law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years. The observation is named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and CEO of Intel, whose 1965 paper described a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years. The period is often quoted as 18 months because of a prediction by Intel executive David House (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and the transistors being faster).

An Osborne Executive portable computer, from 1982, with a Zilog Z80 4 MHz CPU, and a 2007 Apple iPhone with a 412 MHz ARM11 CPU; the Executive weighs 100 times as much, has nearly 500 times the volume, costs approximately 10 times as much (adjusted for inflation), and has about 1/100th the clock frequency of the smartphone.

Consequences

The primary driving force of economic growth is the growth of productivity, and Moore’s law factors into productivity. Moore (1995) expected that “the rate of technological progress is going to be controlled from financial realities”. The reverse could and did occur around the late-1990s, however, with economists reporting that “Productivity growth is the key economic indicator of innovation.”

Technological change is a combination of more and of better technology. A 2011 study in the journal Science showed that the peak of the rate of change of the world’s capacity to compute information was in 1998, when the world’s technological capacity to compute information on general-purpose computers grew at 88% per year. Since then, technological change clearly has slowed. In recent times, every new year allowed humans to carry out roughly 60% more computation than possibly could have been executed by all existing general-purpose computers in the year before. This still is exponential, but shows that the rate of technological change varies over time.

April 22, 2019
Slack Chat for Collaboration

Slack

Sometime ago I began testing Slack Chat or just Slack as it’s called, for collaboration on projects with people from different parts of the world. By far the best system for aggregating documents and media related to projects and it has a snappy messenger but I want to learn how to integrate Slack Chat into my wordpress websites, for communication with readers.

This post is dedicated to my experience with Slack Chat and also I should say that I have tried and tested most every Instant messenger and and always seeking the best tools for collaboration, most recently I’m enjoying Discord and have been learning Teelgram. In the past Skype has been my main tool but Google Hangouts and Zoom are in t here too.

On mobile phone I think that WeChat is superior but I like the ease of WhatsApp and again Skype is a main go-to, but also tried many others and even like an encrypted secure platform of Signal.

What an octopus of online services, recently I saw a site to help manage remote storage overload. This didn’t surprise me because I was wondering how much redundant useless media I have on Dropbox, One Drive and Google Drive, plus a couple others I have but those 3 are huge spaces that I need another app to manage the duplicate removal and stop waste.

My hope was that Slack Chat would become capable of solving a variety of communication, management and collaboration challenges that could always be improved to increase efficiency and save time.

UPDATE: Now that I’ve done the integration of Slack Chat into this WordPress platform and learned how it works and how easy it is to install, I realized that my purpose for Slack is collaboration, not customer support chat, which is more descriptive of how Slack Chat is connected, which is outstanding for that task.

Slack for project collaboration is excellent, just as it is. : )

March 19, 2019
My Office in the Imagination Factory

[box]It’s the middle of winter in British Columbia, as I write this story about imagination, the most valuable commodity in cyber space.[/box]

Bitcoin was born of imagination, almost like a John Lennon lyric; imagine a world with no central bank governance? Imagine a way to digitize money and share or send it across borders without any hassle, simple and easy, pier-to-pier transfers? Imagine an electronic network of digital money that everyone can trust and everyone, everywhere, wants and prefers?

In my mind, this is a new way of developing our world, that is primarily online and creates entire new industries and eco-systems, as we pioneer new ideas and create new language to describe our advancement.

This blockchain bonanza is bigger and growing much faster into a larger wave of development than the web, especially since the web had the wind knocked-out of it’s sails in 2000, even 1999 with Y2K, when there should have been tremendous innovation the investment capital stopped flowing into Internet related projects. None the less, entrepreneurs trudged onward to continue building better systems, connecting every inch of the planet, increasing the speeds and developing the infrastructure and software to transition onto mobile devices and make an app for everything imagination could discover, plus sell digital products to a new generation who use a mobile phone to compute and communicate in a totally new way.

[box size=”large”]Blockchain improves every aspect of the web infrastructure and makes the use of information technology a quantum leap better.[/box]

We live in a brave new space and time for the human race. We have the opportunity to imagine our way out of the dire circumstances we find ourselves in, however it can only happen collectively. There is an awakening happening and the Internet is partly responsible, as it’s innate in humans that we need to know our own truth, about the nature of things that happen in our world. Being connected to all parts of the planet and having empathy for all people, everywhere, is peace revolution.

February 25, 2018
Social Media Madness and Predictable Revenue

In the beginning there was Word, decades before social media madness. Once upon a time being a master of MS Word and Excel Spreadsheets (which still confounds me) was enough of a skill-set to provide you with value in business. Now it’s not enough to be proficient in every app of MS Office but be able to manage and operate content management systems (CMS) as well as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) like a boss.

If you’re an entrepreneur the road to success is laid out in the book, which is a user manual called “Predictable Revenue” by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler. The online marketing best advice you can get.

Not mentioned very much in the book “Predictable Revenue” is how important important Social Media systems are to working with your online marketing strategy. It takes years with a new brand, to build-up enough followers and develop enough influence to make any meaningful marketing metrics. However, you virtually don’t exist without Twitter and Facebook, plus people check-out LinkedIn for due-diligence and others want to see your Instagram feed to get an idea of your lifestyle.

[box]So what’s an aspiring Internet marketing maven supposed to do?[/box]

Some people like Hootsuite or other Social Media Management systems, while others prefer to mainly focus on Twitter and have it be the primary platform for sharing news, ideas and updates. Twitter has a certain learning-curve to understand a good ratio of followers to how many people you follow and your media marketing. Plus it’s very important to be consistent with messaging on Twitter but be aware of how that’s going to look on your Facebook and LinkedIn pages, so it’s a good idea to have dedicated content for your company or project on both Facebook and LinkedIn.

Instagram also posts to Facebook, then if you manage WordPress blogs, as any good marketing maven would be, these are most likely set to post on Twitter and Facebook, which starts to be redundant. It’s recommended to fix your settings to make sure that Twitter posts a format with text only (unless you post an image to Twitter) because WordPress does such a nice job (automatically) of formatting and posting an article with the main image for that story. These functions and instructions can be found inside the Jet Pack bundle provided free as a Plugin on WordPress.

My word to the wise on how to avoid Social Media Madness, is to have a plan and use a pencil and paper to design the connecting of all social media accounts to and from your CMS or Blog, then make sure your Twitter is blasting correctly by looking from someone else’s perspective, ask for opinions from friends, if you’re posting too much to Facebook or LinkedIn, as there’s a risk of driving people away or just become annoying to your friends, so use some discretion.

Lastly, never ever succumb to the temptation to buy followers or follow for follow-backs. It takes time to develop a solid network in the real world, so imagine it’s just as hard and just as important to make decent, intelligent friends and have real followers in Cyber Space.

February 19, 2018
Open Source Investigation as Info Weapon

We the people want the truth, good bad and ugly. Open source investigation helps to expose more factual information but unfortunately along with more dis-information, all needed to fill-in a timeline of an alleged crime in working-theory. Much groundbreaking work has been done by Lee Stranahan from Citizen Journalism School, George Webb from @TruthLeaks and Jason Goodman from Crowd Source the Truth on Youtube. In a very short time the industry of open source investigative, citizen journalism, or as Jason so aptly named it “crowd source the truth”.

Once the crowd source investigation reaches a stonewall or dead-end, where important information is being withheld, then we know we’re over the target, of possible deep-state corruption and/or cover-up. These cases need to be elevated in urgency and steps taken towards obtaining FOIA (freedom of information act) requests. Often the investigators will get tips and leads when a case loses traction but it’s generally obvious when an investigation hits-up against a immovable object and needs to find ways around.

Liberty and privacy are connected, conversely: truth and transparency are connected and open source journalism provides some privacy to some of the researchers. It’s important that we continue to support these intrepid researchers and foster this fledgling industry.

Journalism (as a trade) is in an environment of extreme threat, as confidential sources dry-up.

Crowd-source journalism builds a case on a timeline with factual evidence or recognized citations from verifiable sources, all open to fact-checking and dot-connecting, then back-checked by the crowd.

We live in a world where whistle-blowers are more important than ever, we need to respect the risk and continue to design and develop a framework of investigation management that enables anonymous disclosure, while at the same time vet the sources and corroborate.

Photo credit: Jose Luis Mieza Photography on VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-SA

February 15, 2018
Reflections on Amazonia

Belem do Para is on a part of the river known as the “Lower Amazon”, although the entire region is known in Brazil as the Amazonia. I could say without a doubt that it’s the most memorable place I have ever been, not for a single reason that I would have suspected (before I arrived), however for a couple of reasons I never would have guested – the culture and the beauty. Belem do Para was like fantasy island for me, plus another amazing slice of Brazil, to make me love it all the more. By now I’ve spent over a dozen years getting to know the South American country.

The Amazon river is enchanting and the city of Belem is very mystical. With an equatorial tropical climate, only 24 miles from the Atlantic which provided an afternoon breeze, heaven sent salvage from the ravaging sun, it’s the perfect setting for an out-of-this-world cultural experience. The history of the river and the mystery of the city make a perfect marriage.

The food and music of this city of just over two million souls, was rich and sweet, filled with passion and vigor. The people of Belem really like to party and the city may have been designed for the perfect party place, since all the roads lead to parks and squares. It was normal to see music buses with huge sound sound systems and dancefloor on the roof, with a large group of people dancing along behind. It’s a common thing for the people to party dance in a parade.

Bicycle riders like me, find themselves in paradise because there are 90 kms of bike paths, plus the city has so many riders that the cars have become used to bicycles and it’s common to see couples and even families riding on the same bike. There’s bicycles everywhere you go and places to park them provided at most grocery stores, malls and even restaraunts can offer valet bicycle treatment, yes they have designated space in guarded parking lots too.

January 31, 2018
On becoming a webmaster

Che Guevara monument in Brasilia

The very idea that I can record my own video and publish my own pictures and information on webpages, to share with the world over the Internet, compels me to constantly try to improve my communication skills and learn more about editing, producing and publishing.

The possibilities are endless when it comes to website development, sadly however most people think that everything is about money. Yes, money is important but becoming proficient in a skill that can make you money is more important. Everyone must put-in their 10,000 hours if they want to become an expert at something/anything, that’s just the law of the jungle.

I wanted to become an expert webmaster from the first day I heard that word, and ever since I kept finding more software like Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Camtasia, plus a dozen other programs that needed to be mastered, in order to broaden my scope as a webmaster. The process can continue for ever, to me it’s totally enthralling.

Content is King; you soon learn. Curating, editing and publishing is where it’s at when you’re on-top of your game in a competitive niche online. It’s then all about becoming the authority in a topic, through the power of words and ideas. It’s anybody’s domain to conqueror.

Aaron in Brasilia

Converting eyeballs (web traffic) into dollars, or monetizing the content, as they say in the Digital Marketing Experts courses, the best of which, in the “How to make money online genre”, is the Internet Business Manifesto by my former coach Rich Scheffren. (Note: coaching can accelerate your 10,000 hours learning cycle to become expert). This knowledge delves into product development, shopping carts, merchant accounts and everything related to revenue, including sales and marketing, in my opinion the most important aspect of online business development, however these are topics for another time and we’ll get to that because I just want to focus on this on becoming a good webmaster.

Becoming a good webmaster is the first step in learning how to make money online and at least one proven path towards achieving that objective. If you can learn to be proficient with WordPress, you can make money online. Once you become an expert, you could build a dream business to support a dream lifestyle.

The WordPress personal publishing platform is the most ubiquitous content management system on the Internet. The WordPress Open Source community is the largest group of programmers on the planet, in every country, in every language, involved in every published word online, there is a wordpress blog somewhere involved. Master WordPress to take the best first step towards becoming a webmaster.

July 2, 2014
Back in the saddle…

Ride in style – Brazil beach cruiser

Welcome to the new WordPress site for Silicon Palms. When installed it said: This is my first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging! So I left it as it was and started blogging (again). What motivated me was an opportunity to bring some incredible Internet products and services to Brazil.

For years I was an advocate of Movable Type (MT) content management software but a couple of years ago, after Sixapart the parent company was bought by a Japanese tech company, the open source community dispersed. WordPress advanced in quantum leaps in the time that MT was stagnated, the open source community grew to be larger than any other software community online, with hundreds of excellent and practical plugins. Not to mention the massive design community with theme templates and entire frameworks to ride on top of WordPress and achieve outstanding SEO services to accompany the awesome design choices. More info here http://sydneyseoservices.net/.

Still the point remains the same; how does a small business make money from the Internet, or by using web marketing? This is the most important question and the reason I have rebuilt Silicon Palms website, to turn my attention, once again, back to web development. The business development experts and/or venture capitalists will tell you that the key to success, in any business, is the model to make money – the business model. I’m convinced that I’ve arrived at Mecca when it comes to business models and this site is going to be the vehicle for me to promote the new strategy.

The life-blood of a business is cash flow and the key to cash flow is sales. If a product and/or service can sell itself, than all that needs to happen is marketing and advertising but aside from sex and drugs, most products and services require a concerted, professional sales-team and a strategy, added to an enthusiastic sales campaign. This is what lays in front of Silicon Palms but as they say, before you can work the plan, you need to plan the work – so without further ado – I’m off to launch a new product line.

Please come back soon to learn more about the new improved Silicon Palms. Thanks for taking the time to read this impromptu blog post.

March 27, 2013
Brazil for Offshore IT Outsource
I recently returned to Sao Paulo, Brazil after 6 months in North America, if there were an economic downturn in the rest of the world, they forgot to mention it to Brasileiro’s. This country is drunk with economic excess, even the street vendors are upgrading equipment and spending more money than ever to build-up their businesses. The signs of growth are everywhere in this city, especially in the Event Planning and management Corporate Event Planner, which is sprouting new high-rise condominiums, like springtime grass on a newly seeded soccer pitch. The economic growth Rio, for a change, is even more accelerated than Sao Paulo.

FIFA World Cup 2014

Brazil’s commitment to sport can be seen in the further venue investment that is already under way in Rio. The world-famous Maracanã stadium will close next year for two years of refurbishment. The areas around it will be renovated, with access and transport links improved as the entire neighborhood is reborn ready for host the final of the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Work is already underway on the ongoing development of the Olympic Training Center (OTC), which includes many of the state-of-the-art venues built for the 2007 Pan and Parapan American Games. The OTC will be at the heart of the Rio Games – and international sport for years afterward. Athletes and coaches from all over the world will be offered scholarships to what will be a new regional hub for sport.

Olympic Games, Rio 2016

With a strong economy and now guaranteed funding, Brazil’s economy is now the tenth largest in the world – and predicted to be fifth by the 2016 Olympics. Brazil is the world’s second biggest food exporter, one of the world’s largest oil and ore producers and the fifth largest advertising market. This diverse economy is the engine that drives South America and one of the world’s top 10 consumer markets. Brazil has the highest levels of Internet use in the world and according to the Brazilian Association of Information Technology and Communication Companies (commonly known as BRASSCOM), Brazil’s offshore IT outsourcing market hit $1.4 billion in 2008, rising 75 percent in a single year, making this one of the best places in the world for a web development company.

Experts predict that an additional $500M will be spent just on IT and web development for the FIFA World Cup of soccer in 2014. The overall Latin America market for outsourced services, is expected to grow 12 percent in 2010 to $8 billion, according to Forrester Research. That’s on top of the $19 billion that local companies spend on IT consulting services. However, Brazil has approximately 250,000 IT professionals, 23,000 annual IT graduates, and infrastructure capable of supporting double-digit growth, this places Brazil firmly at the heart of the IT services supply chain in the Southern Hemisphere.

In October 2009, a report from Gartner claimed that “Brazil’s economic footprint combined with having the largest domestic IT consumption in all of Latin America, as well as international recognition as one of the most promising and rapidly emerging economies, makes it a natural destination to evaluate for IT services.
Related articles
- Maracanã Stadium
- Brazil executives’ salaries top London, New York (reuters.com)
December 10, 2010